Perspectives on Complementation

Structure, Variation and Boundaries

M. Höglund, P. Rickman, J. Rudanko, J. Havu, M. Höglund, P. Rickman, J. Rudanko, J. Havu, M. Höglund, P. Rickman, J. Rudanko, J. Havu

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137450067
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Ciencias computacionales general

This book presents the latest work in the field of complementation studies. Leading scholars and upcoming researchers in the area approach complementation from various perspectives and different frameworks, such as Cognitive Grammar and construction grammars, to offer a broad survey of the field and provide thought-provoking reading.

Part I

Structure

1

Constructions License Verb Frames

Laura A. Michaelis

University of Colorado Boulder

1.1 Introduction¹

Where does a verb’s frame come from? The obvious answer is the verb itself, and this is the answer that syntacticians have traditionally provided, whether they describe predicator–argument relations as syntactic sisterhood relations or as lexical properties (the predicator’s combinatoric potential, or valence). Thus, Haegeman, in her introduction to Government and Binding theory, states, “the thematic structure of a predicate, encoded in the theta grid, will determine the minimal components of the sentence” (Haegeman 1994: 55). Similarly, Bresnan, in her introduction to Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), states, “[o]n the semantic side, argument structure represents the core participants and events (states, processes) designated by a single predicator. […] On the syntactic side, argument structure represents the minimal information needed to characterize the syntactic dependents of an argument-taking head” (Bresnan 2001: 304). In lexicalist theories like LFG, whenever the arguments of a verb can have more than one set of syntactic realizations, each distinct realization pattern corresponds to a different mapping from semantic roles to grammatical functions, as expressed in a unique lexical entry, and lexical entries, or classes of lexical entries, are related by lexical rules (Neidle 1994).

The drive to streamline lexical entries by removing predictable properties has led theorists to develop more general, putatively universal, mapping principles, as well as principles for deriving the semantic roles themselves, typically from the positions that they occupy in a decomposed representation of the verb’s event-structure properties. In this approach, as Van Valin and LaPolla (1997: 154) describe it, “[t]here is no need to specify the thematic relations that a verb takes; they follow without stipulation from the logical structure, since they follow by definition from its structure.” Thus few syntacticians currently assume gestalt-like, semantically based verb classes of the type that figure in frame-semantic analysis, for example verbs denoting acts of theft, requesting or attaching (Ruppenhofer et al. 2002). But however they are construed, verbs and verb classes continue to be regarded as the only source of syntactically relevant meaning (Pinker 1989, Van Valin and LaPolla 1997, Levin and Rappaport Hovav 2005). Syntactically relevant meaning is generally identified with aspectual meaning and verb classes with aspectual classes. Syntactic theorists typically represent verb meanings through a form of decompositional analysis, inspired by Dowty (1979) and Jackendoff (1990), that picks out components of causation, change and/or stasis from the scene denoted by a verb (Croft 2012: Ch. 2). For example, in a discussion of Italian auxiliary selection, Levin and Rappaport Hovav (2005: 12ff.) argue that accounts based on the change-of-state entailment are more predictive of essere selection than those that make use of gestalt-like semantic classes like “verbs of bodily process.” At the same time, frame membership has been shown to predict certain verbal syntactic affordances, including null complementation (Ruppenhofer and Michaelis 2014).

While there are differing approaches to lexical–semantic representation, there is little dissent concerning the directionality of the syntax–semantics interface: the verb selects its frame but frames do not select verbs. It is difficult, however, to square this seeming truism with the observation, made by Goldberg (1995, 2006), Kaschak and Glenberg (2000, 2002), Partee and Borschev (2007) and Michaelis and Ruppenhofer (2001), among others, that verbs can appear in unexpected frames, which nonetheless make sense in context. For example, as shown in (1–3), single-argument activity verbs like melt and sparkle, which have nothing intrinsically to do with location, can appear in the “locative inversion” pattern, resulting in what Bresnan (1994: 91) calls an “overlay” of the locative–theme frame:

(1) In Maria’s sticky hand melted a chocolate-chip ice-cream cone. (Birner and Ward 1998: 193)

(2) And in this lacey leafage fluttered a number of grey birds with black and white stripes and long tails. (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995: 226)

(3) Down at the harbor there is a teal-green clubhouse for socializing and parties. Beside it sparkles the community pool. (Vanity Fair, 8/01)

In (1–3), the verb appears to describe what an entity is doing while in its location (melting, fluttering, sparkling) rather than a location state per se. Looking at a similar class of examples in Russian, Partee and Borschev (2007: 158) observe, “[o]ne could say that THING and LOC are roles of the verb [be], but it is undoubtedly better to consider them roles of the participants of the situation (or state) of existing or of being located.” They go on to point out that the situation of existing involves not only a location state but also a particular perspective on that state, which they describe with a visual analogy:

In an existential sentence, the LOC is chosen as the perspectival center; [the sentence asserts] of the LOC that it has THING in it. […] An existential sentence is analogous to the way a security camera is fixed on a scene and records whatever is in that location. (Partee and Borschev 2007: 156)

The security-camera metaphor aptly captures the stylistic effect of the locative–inversion pattern, but if we take it seriously we have to acknowledge that word meaning and syntactic meaning are far more similar than traditional models of syntax would care to admit. Like a word, a syntactic pattern may be conventionally associated with a highly elaborated semantic frame, including a perspectival one. This is the view taken in construction-based syntax, as described by Goldberg (1995, 2002, 2006) and others. According to this view, argument-structure patterns are form–meaning pairings that denote situation types like those denoted by verbs (e.g., an event of transfer, a locational state). As a corollary, a verb’s meaning and combinatory potential (or valence) can change to fit the meaning of a given construction (Goldberg 1995, 2002, 2006, Michaelis and Ruppenhofer 2001, Michaelis 2004). Argument-structure constructions in this model are conceived as constraints on classes of verb entries, which are in turn understood as feature-structure descriptions that specify values for the features that determine morphophonemic form, frame-semantic meaning, valence and syntactic category. The construction-based model of argument structure described in the works cited above is based on reconciling the verb’s feature specifications with those of the construction, rather than the licensing of arguments by verbs. This reconciliation operation requires an overlap between the verb’s semantic representation and that of the construction. Combining verb meaning and construction meaning requires interpreters to create a semantic link between the event denoted by the verb and that denoted by the construction. The possible “linkage” relations, as described by Goldberg (1995: Ch. 2), include instance, means and manner. A result of this integration mechanism is valence augmentation: the set of arguments licensed by the construction may properly include that licensed by the verb with which the construction is combined. Examples of valence augmentation are given in (4–5):

(4) Most likely they were fellow visitors, just panting up to the sky-high altar out of curiosity. (L. Davis, Last Act in Palmyra, p. 28)

(5) When a visitor passes through the village, young lamas stop picking up trash to mug for the camera. A gruff “police monk” barks them back to work. (Newsweek 10/13/97)

In (4), pant, a verb that otherwise licenses only a single argument, appears with two: it denotes the manner of the directed-motion event denoted by the construction. In (5), bark, another otherwise monovalent activity verb, has two additional arguments, a direct object and an oblique expression that indicates direction; in this context, the verb denotes the means by which a (metaphorically construed) caused-motion event, denoted by the construction, occurs. Rather than presuming a nonce lexical entry for pant in which it means “move toward a goal while panting’ and for bark in which it means ‘move something from one place to another by barking,” a constructionist presumes that the verbs in (4–5) mean what they always mean; arguments not licensed by the verb are licensed by the construction with which the verb combines. The constructional model of verbal syntactic variability is therefore more parsimonious than a lexicalist one: it uses a small number of argument-structure constructions and assumes that these constructions can alter verb meanings whenever there is a clash between a verb’s meaning (and its valence) and a construction’s meaning (and its valence). Because it allows novel verb types to be constructed online, the constructional model limits...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Notes on the Contributors
• List of Glossing Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Structure
• Part II Variation
• Part III Boundaries
• Index